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smitty777 writes with news that researchers have discovered another waymethicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteria are developing resistance to antibiotics. According to the study (abstract), the bacteria made the jump to pigs on livestock farms, developed greater resistance through the rounds of antibiotics commonly used to keep the pigs healthy, and then jumped back to humans.
"The important development in the story of ST398 is its move back off the farm into humans, causing first asymptomatic carriage in that original family, and then illnesses in other Dutch residents, and then outbreaks in healthcare settings, and then movement across oceans, and then appearance in retail meat, and then infections in people who had no connection whatsoever to farming—all from an organism with a distinctive agricultural signature. That’s an important evolution, and an illustration once again that, as soon as resistance factors emerge, we really have no idea where they will spread. So it would be a good idea to take actions to keep them from emerging, or at the very least to implement surveillance that would allow us to identify them when they do."

Seriously, why was it considered ok to dump antibiotics into animal feed? It seems like total idiocy from this angle, regardless of the short term benefits.

Because factory farms make more money that way, duh.

They don't give them antibiotics to treat disease. They give them antibiotics because they fatten up faster, I guess cause their immune systems atrophy so they can put more metabolic energy into growth.

But no really, if factory farms didn't save that penny or two per hog we'd ALL be in DEEP TROUBLE then.

Private Eye have been saying this for at least the past decade, but no-one really wanted to know.

Pumping animals full of antibiotics mean that they divert less internal biological resources like protein and fat to fighting infections, and bulk up instead. But those antibiotics just encourage the evolution of resistant bacteria that can survive in those conditions.

they divert less internal biological resources like protein and fat to fighting infections, and bulk up instead

It is not even that complicated: many farmers just pump them with antibiotics preemptively (so they don't get sick, especially with milk-yielding cows)

A biochemist ladyfriend of mine tells me that TFA is not any breaking news: bacteria hopping on other environments and making a comeback as a more resistant strain is something that happens all the time, and there are numerous publication about it. Furthermore, hospitals are known to have their own unique strains thriving around so there is a possibility, how

This is especially true in countries where farms haven't evolved into 'super-farms'. You have the likes of dairy-farmers who are heavily exposed to the volatility which comes part-and-parcel with specialization (i.e. lack of diversification). For a small family farmer, there is limited benefit to thinking long-term. Their livelihood is tied up with next quarter's profit and they don't have the sophistication/time to be hedging exposure on futures exchanges.

It seems like total idiocy from this angle, regardless of the short term benefits.

It's a free market. The farmer using antibiotics to increase growth isn't the one paying the costs of those benefits. He's be a idiot not to maximize his profits. Farming is very competitive (low margins), so if you make enough mistakes you'll go bankrupt very quickly.

A human needs a prescription for most of these antibiotics, in part due to side effects, but also to slow down bacterial resistance. I'm still shocked that an animal doesn't require a similar prescription from a veterinarian for exactly the same reasons. It's not a free market if someone has the law specifically made in their favor...

No you wouldn't. You can buy many prescription antibiotics without a prescription at your local pet store. Sometime look at what is sold over the counter, in the fish section. Larger quantities can be found farm supply stores.
It's the same stuff with "not for human consumption" labels.

Libertarianism cannot cope with tragedy of the commons. You know when libertarians say that positive rights are not guaranteed human rights, because they force someone else into slavery? It gets mentioned on Slashdot pretty commonly.

Your right to live in a world where antibiotics work obliges pig farmers to lower their efficiency and lose money, because it is more cost effective to farm with antibiotics. Likewise, your right to live in a world with breathable air and survivable temperatures and arable land obliges coal factories and car manufacturers to capture their exhausts, including carbon. Libertarians would have to classify these rights as positive rights because they oblige others to take action.

Some libertarians will say that the court system can handle this, because you can sue those that cause you demonstrable harm. But in a case like this, exactly how much money do you think each person who dies from MRSA can extract from a Dutch farm? And isn't it better to live in a world without MRSA and more government regulation than a world with MRSA and more lawsuits?

Anyway, if the right to live in a world free of man-made and man-contributed diseases, where the temperature supports life and there is potable water to drink, is a positive right, then why the fuck do we bother with negative rights like speech and assembly at all? They are sort of meaningless when we're all dead. We all should have standing to take action when the commons could be violated, and the way we do that is through government regulation.

Sorry for a rant on the pointlessness of negative rights without positive rights, but I think that's why it was considered ok to dump antibiotics into animal feed.

It's considered ok because there isn't any real scientific evidence there is an issue. And it's been studied since at least 1990.

Do you want to cite some of those studies to back up your claim? A quick Pubmed search [nih.gov] turns up a whole lot of papers indicating that the use of antibiotics in animal feed is a major contributor the rise of resistant strains.

Because a lot of those results show no such thing. They are spurious hits for that search string. I didn't read past the first half dozen, but it appears only the first two discuss the contribution of antibiotics in animal feed to antibiotic resistance. I didn't read the papers (just their abstracts) so I don't know if those pests also infect humans. But you are certainly wrong that "A quick Pubmed search [nih.gov] turns up a whole lot of papers indicating that the use of antibiotics in animal feed is a

I didn't read past the first half dozen, but it appears only the first two discuss the contribution of antibiotics in animal feed to antibiotic resistance.

Which is one-third of the abstracts you bothered reading. By my count, again just looking at the abstracts, at least six of the twenty papers on the first page indicate a connection between antibiotics in animal feed and the growth of resistant strains; several of those in the next twenty do as well. I'm not going to sit here and do a detailed analysis of how many of the hits are spurious -- like any search engine, Pubmed will turn up a lot of irrelevant crap with any search string -- but the point is tha

None of the papers in that search show that antibiotics in animal feed contributes to resistance in humans. And exactly 4 of all the search results are new work showing a connection between antibiotics in animal feed and *changes* in animal pathogens - let alone resistance. Albeit, pathogens developing resistance from antibiotic doped feed is well known. I suppose PubMed just isn't the place to go looking. Anyway, you obviously did a quick search and didn't give more than a cursory glance at the results

None of the papers in that search show that antibiotics in animal feed contributes to resistance in humans.

Your use of the phrase "resistance in humans" indicates to me that you don't really understand what this debate is about. It's not about resistance in humans, it's about resistance in bacterial strains which can infect humans. And again, many of the papers in the search indicate that the use of antibiotics in animal feed contributes to exactly that. Sorry you failed reading comprehension in elementary school, but please, stop spouting off about things you don't understand.

And isn't it better to live in a world without MRSA and more government regulation than a world with MRSA and more lawsuits?

Though we'll probably end up with MRSA and more regulations (and probably immunity from lawsuits). Government officials didn't give farmers an exception to antibiotic prescription regulations because of political philosophy: they did it for a cut of the profit.

We all should have standing to take action when the commons could be violated, and the way we do that is through government regulation.

I'm not a libertarian purist, so I'll agree that a theoretical pure libertarian state would have a problem handling this sort of case. But let's look at the real world, where we are spending billions of dollars employing ten of thousands of people in the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Agriculture, the Office of the Surgeon General, and who knows how many oth

Seriously, why was it considered ok to dump antibiotics into animal feed? It seems like total idiocy from this angle, regardless of the short term benefits.

Farmers just don't understand the issue. I heard an interview with a representative of some group of farmers discussing this issue last year. He was defending the use of antibiotics for "growth promotin" (sic) because they only used a low dose! Of course high doses may have their problems also (if it would allow some to get to the human food supply), but he did not seem to understand that using low doses (presumably somewhat inconsistently administered through the animal feed) could lead to resistence in bacteria.

Seriously, why was it considered ok to dump antibiotics into animal feed? It seems like total idiocy from this angle, regardless of the short term benefits.

One reason I became a vegetarian was because I learned about all the antibiotics in Pork/Beef/Poultry. I suffered severe Streptococcus infections in the respiratory system. When learning I was effectively on Antibotics, constantly, due to my diet, thus prescription antibiotics were having no observable effect, I realized I was fighting Streptococcus which was already resistant, thus I was getting these painful and long duration infections.

Understand this: Antibiotics are targeted toxins, most likely to have a greater effect upon certain organisims, while there would be some collateral effect upon the host, including degradation of the immune system.

After about 2 years without antibiotic-laden foods I found I stave off these infections more effectively and when I have them the duration is significantly decreased.

Keeping like livestock (or plants) in a dense concentration provides an ideal breeding ground for organisms to prey upon them, further, to mutate as the turnover can be far more rapid than in the wild. Add to that antibiotics and you have the ideal incubator for super-bugs. Victims of our own way of production. Won't get better with bigger factory farms, either, it's a cycle which builds upon itself.

That's one of the reasons I gave up meat 12 years ago. The allowances for turning "animal" into "food" are so absurd and frankly disgusting that I went cold... uh... tofu?

The next trick is keeping a fair amount of Organic in your diet, so you don't have concentrations of some ag-chemicals. Nothing presently warning they are uber bad, but I'm not taking chances.

A great example of how organisms which prey upon a specific host prosper is the Phylloxera epidemic in Napa Valley of California. Lots of vines in close proximity is heaven for the little fly, which damages roots and makes the vines vulernable to fungal infections, which eventually kill the vine. Driving past an aff

It depends where you are. If I lived in the US, with its lax standards of food safety and animal welfare, I'd be vegetarian too.

Another poster recommended eating organic foods. Yeah. Handy hint - if you're going to eat organic vegetables, make sure you wash and peel them carefully, and give them a good boil. Oh, and use hand sanitiser.

The organic bit is pretty disgusting too. I've shovelled tons of it on the farm.

I half joke that all the hub-bub over the bird-flu research papers being released is unnecessary - all any 'terrorist' has to do to get a 'superbug' is to get involved in any chicken farm. (Or pig farm.)

"Antibiotics have been used in animal feed for about 50 years ever since the discovery not only as an anti-microbial agent, but also as a growth-promoting agent and improvement in performance...."

The best way to select for antibiotic resistant bugs (on humans or any other animal) is to continually subject them to an antibiotic-filled environment (hospitals and farms). The story of resistant bacteria jumping from host to host, from farm to people vice versa, across the ocean, etc. doesn't seem particularly surprising. There are plenty of examples of bacteria & viruses moving between species. And, with global trade and travel, it's just a matter of time before diseases spread all over.

Wash your hands after handling meat, wash all the implements and counter tops that may come into contact with raw meat. Cook the meat well.

Be careful with restaurants; to minimize your chances of exposure, just say no to eating out unless you can't avoid it. Once in a while is OK but several times a week is a good way to pick something up, if not MRSA then hep-C or some other nasty microbe that the waiter carried to your plate from someone else's plate. If you don't see the waiters wash their hands after taking your plates away, then you can bet they didn't wash their hands after taking the previous customer's plates either. When the water boy comes over to refill your glass, hand it to him by the rim, so he's forced to pick it up by the bottom. Use a straw.

And stay out of hospitals. Those places can make you sick. MRSA is one nasty infection that you don't want to get, but there are others as well. Basically it's a rather closed environment full of sick people, and also full of well people carrying the germs from one sick person to another, and your life may depend on how well they washed and sanitized their hands before touching you.

This may seem kind of paranoid, but we live in an increasingly crowded and mobile world where a nasty little microbe in some little corner of the globe can make its way into your soup literally days or hours later.

How the hell is this crap modded up? It doesn't just seem paranoid, it is paranoid.

You need to get some help, dude. It's called germophobia. Do you seriously avoid going out to eat because you're that afraid of germs? Hepatitis C?! I'll bet you've got quite the social life!

I'm not saying it doesn't happen and I have absolutely no numbers to back this up, but I have a feeling you're much more likely to get in a serious car accident on the way to the restaurant than you are to get hepatitis C!

> How the hell is this crap modded up? It doesn't just seem paranoid, it is paranoid.

Not really; it's common sense. Medical professionals in hospitals and clinics know about the risks of infection. It's a kind of dirty secret, because if the public suspected how "dirty" hospitals really are, no one in his right mind would even visit one.

> You need to get some help, dude. It's called germophobia. Do you seriously avoid going out to eat b

A book where she conviently ignors the fact that if this was true, superbug would be PIGS AND COWS.Her book draws several correlations to gether, does NOTHING to lok at causation, ignores anything that is counter to her claim, tells scary stories.;however it demonstrates nothing.

All this for her over arching goal to end industrial ag.

Actual well done scientific studies have show it priparily comes from hospitals, and to a lesser extent peopel not complete there antibiotic treatment.

The general principle has been known for many many years. I worked in a lab in the 1980's that was doing ressearch on the use of antibiotics in feed because we knew it would lead to resistence being spread given the prevalence of the genes on plasmids. It's obvious to any microbiologist.

The antibiotic companies sell the bulk of their product ( and manufacture it cheaply ) to agriculture. The large agribusinesses whose cost cutting 'efficiencies' would fail disasterously without it run the Dept of Ag in the

Second of all, you can vote with your wallet against this. Just buy all natural pastured pork instead of the factory farmed pork. When the pigs are raised out on pasture using managed rotational grazing they don't have any need for antibiotics in their feed to stay healthy. This results in healthier meat for you so you stay healthier.

If you care, support your local pasture based farmers. Yes, it will cost more than the government subsidized

We can be meat eaters and still be alarmed about the health and quality of the food supply. Being a vegetarian/vegan has nothing to do with it. There are serious concerns about our grain, vegetable and fruit supplies as well between pesticides, GMOs and processed foods. Quit sticking your nose to the sky and actually look at the whole problem.

Anyone not aware of the risks GMO's are posing on society should really do some reading. The scientists that are developing these seeds and pesticides wont even go near them because there is no long-term research on what risks they could offer 10 or 20 years from now. Scarey shit.

Anyone not aware of the risks GMO's are posing on society should really do some reading.

Anyone who bought into the fearmongering and often times outright lies [youtube.com] of the anti-GE campaign should do some reading. [biofortified.org]

The scientists that are developing these seeds and pesticides wont even go near them because there is no long-term research on what risks they could offer 10 or 20 years from now.

Funny, I've spoken with scientists who do just that. I didn't notice them eating any differently than anyone else. I've transformed plants before. I have no problem eating genetically engineered food. I do it all the time.

And there has been long term research (unless you define long term as X+5 so you can always keep moving that goalpost). Darnedest thing is though, what hasn't been done is for someone to propose a plausible mechanism as to why GE crops would be dangerous. We know the genes inserted (cry genes, epsps, bar, nptII, PRSV/CMV coat protein genes) are safe, but for all the cries of 'what might happen' no one has explained what in GE crops allegedly hurts you, how it is produced, its mode of action, ect. I suppose GE crops could kill us all 20 years down the road, but only in the same sense that the smallpox vaccine could do the same thing, or that there could be an invisible heatless dragon in my garage waiting to eat me. After so much study has been done, you can only play the appeal to ignorance card for so long, then the burden of proof shifts to the people believing that to prove it.

Scarey shit.

What's scary is that agriculture is staring down an increasing population, global climate change, increasing energy costs, peak phosphorus, increasing pressure on fresh water resources, evolving pests and pathogens, desertification, deforestation, greater demand for animal protein, and agriculture has to take care l that without expanding the amount of land under the plow, and we've got people having not based in science blanket opposition to what will probably go down as the most significant breakthrough in plant improvement since unraveling Mendelian genetics. Now THAT is scary.

ah. i see. thanks for reminding me that i am a stupid vegetarian, and that super MRSA is not, in fact, related to the fact that people eat pork when it is entirely unnecessary.

by the way, if there is something wrong with the food supply, then perhaps restaurants and grocery stores could stop throwing it out when its perfectly good to eat, . . . or perhaps the government could stop paying farmers to not grow things. and maybe most of food costs , if they were not related to packaging , marketing, reprocessin

by the way, if there is something wrong with the food supply, then perhaps restaurants and grocery stores could stop throwing it out when its perfectly good to eat, . . . or perhaps the government could stop paying farmers to not grow things. and maybe most of food costs , if they were not related to packaging , marketing, reprocessing, re-reprocessing, value added, etc,..... until those things happen, i am not sure i will ever be convinced there is a 'food shortage'.

So a bunch of rich people don't bother to take a "doggy bag" home when they eat at the restaurants near your house, and from that you infer that U.S. farmers can produce and transport enough food to feed the entire world? And you think the reason people starve is because processing, packaging, marketing, and advertising costs have driven up the cost of a box of Hot Pockets too high?

Darnedest thing is though, what hasn't been done is for someone to propose a plausible mechanism as to why GE crops would be dangerous.

You're fail to understand what drives some scientists to adhere to the principal of least harm.

If there are possible adverse, irreversible effects of human activity on our ecosystem, and the state of our knowledge is such that we can as a species initiate such effects without understanding how they manifest, then one school of thought is to halt human intervention/activity in those potentially sensitive shared domains.

Your shouting at length to "explain how this harm may come about" when we do not have the technical understanding about how such harms may come about is, despite your education and rational abilities, stupidity in action.

The moral of the story here is there are things we don't know that can cause great irreversible harm and that regulating/preventing activity in certain circumstances can avoid these harms.

The other school of thought looks at the social and political consequences of putting the power to genetically engineer crops in the hands of organisations like Monsanto. I'm in support of research into this area, but the prospect of widespread deployment makes me rather nervous.

Darnedest thing is though, what hasn't been done is for someone to propose a plausible mechanism as to why GE crops would be dangerous. We know the genes inserted (cry genes, epsps, bar, nptII, PRSV/CMV coat protein genes) are safe, but for all the cries of 'what might happen' no one has explained what in GE crops allegedly hurts you, how it is produced, its mode of action, ect.

Actually there is a mechanism. One of the big companies tried to insert a gene into brazil nuts (either BT or herbicide resistance) and found out that it produced an unexpected immune response because of the way the protein was folded. They abandoned the project, and wrote an article about it in the New England Journal of Medicine, which I read. That's the poster child of the anti-GM movement.

I'm not particularly worried about GM food. I eat GM cornflakes every day (as I found out afterwards). I couldn't avoid GM food if I wanted to. And I do get annoyed when I see the truly stupid arguments against GM food by political science majors who never took a biology course.

But give the critics their due. We in the US turned our entire corn and soybean production into GM crops without notifying consumers about it, and without letting them make their own decisions as consumers who supposedly rule this wonderful free market. There was no labeling and food processors weren't even allowed to sell their food as GM-free for years. Monsanto may believe in a lot of things but they certainly don't believe in a free market.

You can't even get GM-free food in this country any more because the GM strains have contaminated everything else, and when the food companies try to sell grains to Europe, where there are restrictive laws, they're forced to go to the international trade commission and ask (or rather demand) that they be allowed to define food with no more than 1%, or 0.1% (or whatever) GM food as GM-free.

You believe in science? The scientific method says that you have to take your hypotheses and beliefs, and subject them to confirmation in the real world. If you believe that GM food is safe, you have to prove it with data. That's not as easy as you make it out to be. It's not enough to feed a hundred mice for 6 months and see if any of them keels over. It's not even enough to feed 300 million Americans GM corn and soybeans for 20 years and see if any of them keels over, as we did. It is actually impossible to prove generically that GM food is safe. You have to take each specific food.

Let's suppose you're really, really smart and you thought really, really hard, and you couldn't think of a plausible mechanism by which GM food can do harm. That doesn't mean there isn't one. Nobody would have thought that inserting a BT gene into brazil nuts would produce an immune reaction, but it happened.

I don't care how smart you are -- you don't understand the human immune system well enough to predict what can go wrong, because nobody understands the human immune system well enough to predict what can go wrong. That's why that contract lab in England injected a half dozen test subjects with a new drug that caused an unexpected autoimmune reaction and caused one kid to lose his fingers a few years ago. I was taught that proteins were all destroyed in the digestive system, but then I saw in the New Scientist that some of them do survive. What can they do?

I went to a meeting where a scientist from the Natural Resourced Defense Fund made the case that GM foods might cause unexpected immune reactions. I thought it was bullshit. Then I found out about the brazil nuts. What other totally unexpected problems could we have? You don't know. They've got a point.

I will stipulate that Jeremy Rifkin is an idiot, and if we listened to him in 1984 we wouldn't have been able to develop T cell growth factor, we wouldn't have developed a test for AIDS, and we wouldn't have developed treatments for AIDS. We wouldn't have sequenced the human genome, we wouldn't have developed imatinib and CML would st

. Darnedest thing is though, what hasn't been done is for someone to propose a plausible mechanism as to why GE crops would be dangerous.

The modified proteins that are created by the GM process (and after digestion) many contain end and side chains that may have some other function in the human body or are not processed correctly. Like the way insecticides mimic hormones or people have allergies to things like peanuts (bizarrely, we never heard of that in the 1970's).

GMO can do all sorts of good and evil things. good things like grow in the desert or increase vitamin A yield. bad things like require pesticide use or unintentionally mess with ecosystems

but what they can't do is poison you or give you cooties. it's just technology. technology like metalworking: it can used to make better harvesters, or better guns. or chemical engineering: mass produce aspirin, or mass produce phosgene

Splicing in gene sequences from various places, how the hell can you say that this stuff won't poison you? That reads like unscientific garbage to me.

There's no need to fear this stuff like th epost you replied to, but there's every need to research it properly and make sure that modification X doesn't also introduce slow-acting carcinogen Y into your magic desert-growing vitamin-A wheat.

Because the meaning I was trying to convey was that it's silly to say it can't poison you, unless there's some magic going on that I don't know about, I'm sure it could if genes for belladonna toxin generation were put into a food crop, to give a silly example.

"then go hide in your closet. GMO is going on every day, for billions of years. it's called mother nature"

Nice, see your tone hasn't changed in the last decade.

You don't see a difference between evolution (including directed evolution by human selection, and DNA insertion via micro-organisms) and direct human manipulation of the plant genome as different phenomena?

mankind is going to pursue this technology, no matter what you think or do. you don't stop mankind's technological progress. the same technology that can make better pipes for irrigation can be used to make better guns for killing

so what you do is you don't stand against GMO, because it can make wheat grow in the desert or put vitamin a in crops where the local diet is deficient in that

what you do is stand against the BAD THINGS that the new technology can do: create ecosystem destroying organisms or crops

mankind is going to pursue this technology, no matter what you think or do. you don't stop mankind's technological progress. the same technology that can make better pipes for irrigation can be used to make better guns for killing

So sensible people speak up with concerns about whether the guns are being sold to third-world warlords.

so what you do is you don't stand against GMO, because it can make wheat grow in the desert or put vitamin a in crops where the local diet is deficient in that

what we need, is less people on this planet. and unfortunately, this will come via grief rather than sensible planning. it's not that we don't see the tragedy coming, it is that we are helpless to convince anyone to change their short-sighted thinking to prevent the inevitable. you don't need to grow crops in the desert unless there are too many people in the desert already. so don't worry about the dangers here, mother nature has it all figured out. mankind has created a natural imbalance of population tha

Processed foods I'll give you. People really should move back to whole foods, preferably vegetables, in place of highly processed grains and sugars. Pesticides have their place. There's a lot to be said for moving more toward IPM strategies than we currently have, sure, but they are a necessary evil. Heck, even plants produce their own pesticides. They don't make those secondary metabolites for the fun of it. And it's funny that you mention GE crops as a problem in the same sentence as pesticides, considering the effects [nature.com] they've had on pesticide usage. There's plenty of criticisms to make about how people eat and how food is grown. Processed foods are one. Monoculture & lack of biodiversity, over-fertilization & run-off, water scarcity & depleting aquifers, ect. would be much better practices to gripe about, and issues like peak phosphorus, declining agricultural research, and agriculture in the face of climatic issues are also worth considering. Pesticides and especially biotechnology (in and of themselves anyway) are not...not that pesticide use shouldn't be reduced where possible.

I have yet to find some who thing we should stop to have even rudimentary knowledge of things like half-life, dosage, absorption. That is the most BASIC information you should have before forming an opinion.

But , you know, that's hard. SO we will continue to march along with opinion based on books in the 70s that had no science behind them.

Yeah, that's true too. There are bunches of regulations on how long before harvest you can spray for any given pesticide, and by the time you eat it, the amount left over isn't something I'd worry about. When people complain about pesticides, they rarely take that into consideration (and by rarely I mean I haven't actually seen it happen yet). It's always nice to minimize inputs if you can do so while keeping the output constant (especially if you're a farmer and those sprays are coming out of your botto

The GP actually has a point even though he fails horribly to put it forward in any constructive manner. The argument is that keeping animals for food almost inevitably results in them being more likely to contract diseases due to living in closer proximity to one another. Furthermore, because humans handle these animals frequently, the risk that a new and nasty pathogen can jump from animals to humans increases. While excluding animal products from our food chain would not completely eliminate the risk of i

please remind me again how the modern human is 'designed to eat meat', and how 'natural' meat is, and how vegetarians suffer from various delusions and alarmist theories about the health and quality of the food supply.

Nah, I'd rather just remind you that you're a self-righteous fucking moron.

Humans are Omnivores for a reason. Meat eaters are healthier then vegetarians because it is overly complex to match the incomplete proteins in plants all the time. If we were intended to eat just vegetables we would have multiple stomachs like cattle do so that we'd be able to get those vitamins and proteins easier. A good number of Primates eat meat as well for the same reason. The Illusion that Vegetarians are "healthier" is because they typically are more "health conscious" and go to the doctor freque

That is an outdated thought process that lost all credibility before bell-bottoms did. Humans can synthesize all of our protein requirements as long as we get the basic amino acids. Tofu and quinoa are both complete proteins, and you'll find that most, if not all, vegetarians eat both of those. With a simple mix of rice, bread, and legumes (which you're eating as a vegetarian) you're going to get all your aminos. You don't have to plan it at all nor do you have to "blend" proteins to get them all in on

. I lead a very active lifestyle -- I bike to work, scuba dive, teach spin classes, and work out regularly. (I'm known as one of the tougher spin instructors.) I go to the doctor about once a year to get a checkup.

And this is why you are healthy.

I eat a vegan diet

Not this.

Granted your diet likely involves not loading up on potato chips, and twinkies every day... so a "healty diet" is important. But it doesn't need to be "vegan" to be "healthy".

And to the best of my knowledge, meat is natural. I'm not familiar with non meat mammals, so I would call meat natural.

"and how vegetarians suffer from various delusions and alarmist theories about the health and quality of the food supply."this has nithing to do with the other two issue; however, I have never heard a vegetarian state a sane theory about the health and quality of the food supply.And the person who wro